A “ghost bike” dedicated to Amanda Servedio, a Queens cyclist killed in October 2024. (Credit: Jarrod Barry)
As a frequent cyclist, Amy Obermeyer is used to weaving through traffic. Even in the bike lanes, she often sees cars, motorcycles and even news vans parked in her way. An Uber driver once pulled into the bike lane in front of her, forcing her to brake suddenly and sending her tumbling over the handlebars.
“I’ll see three or four cars parked in a bike lane in a one-mile walk,” Obermeyer, 40, said.
Obermeyer’s experience isn’t unusual on New York’s crowded streets. Whether it’s parking, bus lanes or outdoor dining, few things stir the passions of New Yorkers more than a fight over who gets to claim the precious pavement outside their door. These conflicts have only gotten worse with the growth in cycling in the past few years.
Between 2018 and 2023, there was a 16% increase in daily bike ridership, according to the Department of Transportation. Queens saw a nearly 45% increase during that time period, the sharpest rise of any borough. But the city’s turn toward biking has brought risks. In 2023, 30 people died riding bicycles, the most in 24 years, DOT numbers show.
In Queens, cyclists in Astoria have experienced the highest number of accidents. In 2023, the New York City Police Department’s 114th precinct, which covers the neighborhood, reported that there were 154 crashes involving cyclists, resulting in 141 injuries and two deaths, the most of any precinct in the borough. Last October, the community suffered a tragedy when a local cyclist was killed by a motorist in a hit-and-run. In some ways, the neighborhood is a microcosm of the problems faced citywide as cyclists and motorists jostle to share increasingly congested streets.
Kian Betancourt, a member of Community Board 1, which represents Astoria, has made it his mission to push for safer streets in the area. He says the problem comes down to poor enforcement of traffic laws and poor street and cycle lane design. Police, he said, are more focused on ticketing cyclists than cars, even though cars kill more cyclists and pedestrians. At the same time, Astoria doesn’t have the infrastructure to keep cyclists safe.
“The research is clear,” he said. “Protected bike lanes benefit everyone.”
For years, cycling activists have pushed the city to build more protected bike lanes, which are separated from traffic by either a physical barrier or a line of parked cars. According to Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit focused on pedestrian and cyclist safety and accessibility, 85% of bike fatalities happened on streets without this kind of infrastructure. However, progress has been slow. As part of an ambitious 2019 law that aimed to improve the city’s public transit network, the DOT is required to build 250 miles of protected bike lanes by 2026. But by the end of 2024, the city had only built 86 miles of protected bike lanes, far below its goal.
“We have to ensure that we have protected bike lanes,” said Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic assemblymember whose district includes Astoria and who is running for mayor in the Democratic primary. “What we’ve seen from the city is slow-walking the legal mandates to actually build those out. And what that means is leaving cyclists to be protected by paint, which has proven itself to not be a barrier to cars.”
Astoria has about 21 miles of standard bike lanes, but there is only one major protected bike lane and no complete east-west one. Most of the neighborhood bike lanes are painted lanes, or in some cases “sharrows” — lanes shared by cars and bikes.
“Sharrows are even worse than paint only,” said Alexa Sledge, the director of communications at Transportation Alternatives. “It’s wild that they’re even classified as anything on a bike map.”
And even when there are protected bike lanes, cyclists say that gaps or design problems allow motorists to park or even drive down the lanes, forcing riders to swerve into the street — or worse.
Cycling advocates have faced pushback, particularly from city council members in car-heavy districts. Vickie Paladino, who represents a nearby Queens district that includes College Point and Bayside, has been an especially fierce critic. In social media posts, Paladino has called cycling a “hobby of a group of millionaires” and said that bike lanes cater to “an extremely tiny sliver of affluent gentrifying progressive activists.” In a December 2024 City Council meeting over proposed e-bike legislation, she took aim at the DOT and its push to build more dedicated bike lanes.
“I do not understand how two lanes, with a corral of bicycles, helps our buses to make their wide turns, helps our truck drivers who have to deliver and make deliveries in our city,” she said. “How does this work? How does that help a pedestrian who’s trying to cross a street?”
Sledge described expansion efforts as “trench warfare,” with activists often fighting “block by block, bike lane by bike lane” to expand the system. The result is that a lot of time and money gets spent fighting the same fight in different neighborhoods.
Betancourt has struggled to build support for more bike lanes in Astoria. He said that political opposition, stigma against delivery riders and bureaucracy make it hard to get bike lanes built. Many car owners in Astoria simply don’t want to lose on-street parking.
“A lot of the things that pedestrians and cyclists need are at odds with what motorists want,” he said. “If we want safe ways to bike or walk around, it has to come at the expense of where we allocate public space for private motor vehicles.”
Improvements are on the horizon, though. A protected bike lane on 31st Avenue is under construction and, when finished, will finally provide cyclists a safe east-west route across the neighborhood. Mamdani called it a model for other streets in the area.
“For too long, we’ve been told by the city to be satisfied with one protected bike lane,” he said. “New Yorkers don’t live their life on a north-south axis. They also go east and west, and they deserve protection when they do so.”
